We’re in the full dog days of summer! It has been hot, but fortunately mostly not too smoky (yet). We’re mostly trying to stay cool and wondering which one of our appliances is going to break next!
In Books…
- James: Jim is a slave in Hannibal, Missouri. He is owned by Miss Watson, who also serves as a guardian to young Huckleberry Finn, a local errant youth. When Jim learns that she intends to sell him, he runs away to a small island in the Mississippi River, intending to return shortly for his family so they can all escape together. Instead, the next morning, he discovers Huck on the island, having faked his own death after his violent, alcoholic father attacked him. Realizing that it will be assumed that he killed Huck and fled, the two head off on the river so that Jim can escape to freedom in the north and regroup. Their path does not go smoothly. They have a series of “adventures”, though perhaps travails would be a more accurate word. Jim finds himself separated from Huck, sold twice over, escaping for his life once again. He’s reunited with Huck and the two return to Hannibal to try to free Jim’s family, but discover that their journey is not yet over. I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school, but it was definitely in the second semester of my senior year, which means I was not like, especially attentive to it. I mostly remember not really liking it. I do remember that I found the portrayal of Jim very uncomfortable, even as someone who grew up in an area where the racial politics were not great. The idea of a book that retold the story from his perspective, giving him dignity and agency, was very appealing, and of course this book has won or been shortlisted for many, many prizes. So my expectations were very high, but ultimately this was a book I found more admirable than one I actually connected with. It does a reasonable job with character development, but it’s much more focused on its sometimes-frenetic plot than it is on its characters. Which meant for me that a crucial late-plot revelation didn’t quite land. It didn’t feel like it got the room to develop, or breathe. But even more than plot, this is a book that wants the reader to pay attention to its themes, particularly around the construction of identity. In Percival Everett’s telling, the reason that Jim speaks in stereotyped, offensive dialect is that slaves have developed that method of speech to hide their real voices from whites, to protect themselves by allowing whites to feel superior. There are at least two characters who pass, one knowingly and one unknowingly. Jim at one point joins a company of minstrel singers, where his comparatively light complexion is made up to fit the caricature the audience expects to see. And, of course, when Jim does achieve his freedom at the end (in a different way than he does in Mark Twain’s original), he claims his full name. Given the opportunity to decide what he wants to be called, it’s “James”. We are who others see to some extent, but we are also who we decide to be. So while I was disappointed that I found it hard to get really engaged with, it’s a rich, well-told story that mines new depths of meaning out of a familiar tale. It won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, it’s very good and I would happily recommend it to anyone (especially those who love plot-forward books).
- The Devoted: Eunha lives every mother’s worst nightmare. Her three year-old son, Minsuk, pulls free from her hand in a crowd in the harbor near where they live in Hong Kong. One second she still sees him, the next he’s gone. While her in-laws insist on calling the police, Eunha makes a much more useful call…to her brother, Solomon, a high-ranking member of the Triads. While he has connections in the underworld that lead to Minsuk’s return, suspicion that those same connections led to the boy’s abduction in the first place drive her husband to formalize their de facto separation and her sister-in-law to remove the boy from his mother’s apartment for protection. She feels she has no choice but to accept these developments, because she’s not just the sister of a gangster, but the daughter of one too, and she knows that the legal system will not be inclined to look at her favorably. Adrift without her son, she comes across a room salon, where men come to drink and entertain themselves in the company of pretty, engaging women. Eunha starts to find community there, becoming friendly with Jing, one of her co-workers, when someone walks in from her childhood and turns this newly established world upside down. Kaito was the nephew of her father’s right-hand man, about the same age as Solomon, and was the only other child they saw on anything resembling a regular basis as the siblings grew up with their grandmother, their mother having suffered a nervous breakdown after being kidnapped herself when Eunha was very small and their father wanting to keep them safely outside the grasp of his foes. He, too, has joined the Triads, and as she’s drawn back into his orbit, Eunha has to decide whether she wants the safe life her father had tried to arrange for her before his own death or if she should throw in her lot with the underworld she’s always been around the edges of. This is a book that sits at a bit of an uneasy genre intersection. There are strong mystery/thriller elements here, but it’s slow-paced and a significant portion of the narrative consists of Eunha’s childhood memories, building her character as well as Solomon’s and Kaito’s. For me, this was very effective, because I really enjoy character-oriented stories and the tension of the plot kept me turning the pages to find out how the story developed. People who really enjoy thrillers, though, will likely feel like it drags. Maybe not, though, because Catherine Cho structures the book to have several mini-mysteries. The initial suspense of what might happen to Minsuk is (thankfully for mothers of small boys) relatively quickly resolved. But then more dominoes fall: there’s a murder, there’s the question of how/if Eunha will get her son back, there are the suitcases that Eunha notices Jing bringing to the salon and leaving without, and then there’s the narrative-long development of what happened between Eunha, Solomon, and Kaito over the course of their childhoods and how it reverberates into their adult lives. The plot does feel a little unbalanced, with the end picking up speed significantly in a way that feels a bit dizzying. The plot is also put together too neatly at points, and some connections are telegraphed too obviously (I guessed a couple twists myself and I am terrible at that sort of thing). I mostly found it engaging and interesting, and I appreciated the character work. For a reader who, like me, likes something a bit more leisurely, this will be an enjoyable summer read and I’d recommend it. For the true thriller heads, though, look elsewhere.
- The Girls of 17 Swann Street: Anna Roux weighs 88 pounds. Once a ballerina living in Paris, now she’s at 17 Swann Street, an eating disorder recovery group home in Saint Louis, Missouri. Somewhere between a career-derailing injury, her move with her husband Matthias to the United States for a better job for him, not being able to find work she actually likes for herself, and struggling to find community in her new home, a habit of restricting her food intake spiraled into something much darker. As she makes tentative connections with the other women in the group, like longtime resident Emm, shy and sweet Valerie, and high-spirited Julia, Anna is faced with a stark choice: either she wants to live, which means she has to eat, or she can completely surrender to the pain and fear behind her disorder and watch her body become unable to support her continued existence. Anyone who has lived with an eating disorder will immediately clock that Yara Zghaib is writing this novel from a perspective of having lived it herself, and that insider’s perspective goes a long way to keep this book from feeling like an after school special. It is very much an Issue Book, there are definitely some info-drops about anorexia that occasionally feel a little clunky. But it’s rooted in tremendous empathy for those who deal with eating disorders, the deadliest mental illnesses. The plot, to be honest, is a bit on the formulaic side…from the moment it begins and Anna starts meeting the other girls, it’s obvious that someone is going to die, someone else is going to get kicked out. It’s also pretty obvious that Anna herself will make it out alive. Her relationship with Matthias, who comes to visit her daily, is warm and vital, and her memories of happiness with him form a central component of the narrative. But figuring out how and when she will turn the corner provided enough forward momentum for me, at least. I was invested in her as a character and her journey towards reclaiming life. The book has quick, short chapters that keep it going, so despite what is often heavy subject matter it doesn’t feel ponderous or wallow-y. It’s a hard book to affirmatively recommend because of what it’s about, but if you’re inclined towards it I think it’s very much worth the time, I found it touching.
- Sister of My Heart: Anju and Sudha are cousins, but they feel more like sisters. Born on the same day, their fathers (themselves cousins) having been killed at the same time, they’re raised by both mothers, as well as a widowed aunt, in Anju’s family home. Beautiful Sudha dreams big but mostly follows the rules, while Anju is a bold risk-taker. As a pre-teen, Sudha learns a secret about her family that makes her feel an even greater sense of responsibility towards Anju. So when she falls in love with a man her mother won’t consider for her husband and plans to elope, but learns that the parents of the man Anju has fallen for will put a stop to her upcoming marriage if they catch even a whiff of scandal, she has to decide whether she should follow her heart or sacrifice her own happiness for her cousin’s. Anju and Sudha’s lives take different directions, with one moving to America while the other remains in India, and their closeness waxes and wanes, but there’s too much history between them for their bond to ever truly be severed, even as their lives take unexpected paths. This book felt like it lives pretty squarely in a genre that has come to feel a bit retro: women’s fiction. Not chick lit, chick lit is more lighthearted and comedic, but women’s fiction. It’s not pure melodrama, but definitely leans that way: there are long-suppressed family lies, falling in love with the wrong person, sudden heart disease, a love triangle, controlling in-laws, a desperate quest for a baby, people who are not who they seem. But to pull off a story with the dramatic plot twists and turns that this one takes, I needed to feel more connected with the characters. The novel is told through alternating chapters from either woman’s perspective, which would seem to be a natural way to balance out the character development, but I found Sudha to be more fully realized than Anju. Their bond and the way it shifts over time is rendered convincingly enough, it was what I found most enjoyable about it overall. The portrait the reader gets of Sudha, though, is of a person whose motives hang together and make sense as a way to approach the world, while Anju felt more like an idea of a person, it was hard to imagine what she might have been up to between segments. Something she finds deeply wounding happens about midway through the book, but near the end she realizes she’s forgotten about it in a way that didn’t seem particularly realistic, even considering that something devastating has happened in between. When the really bad thing happens, I felt hard-hearted for not finding it all that affecting, but I just hadn’t been given enough reason to really emotionally invest in her. It ends with what feels like a cliffhanger for a sequel, which was indeed written, but I am not nearly curious enough about what might happen to read it. If you’re in the mood for an emotion-forward story about family and particularly like books set in India, this might appeal to you. It’s far from bad, but I can’t honestly recommend a book that I was never able to get really hooked into.
- Open Season: The deck is stacked against anyone who isn’t a white man in the United States. If you don’t understand quite how, Ben Crump’s book, published just about a year before the Black Lives Matter movement took off, lays out the case. He examines the ways those lives, most especially those of people of color, are placed in peril: from very straightforward, obvious ways like police brutality to more subtle, insidious ones like educational opportunities and environmental racism. That Crump is a lawyer, specifically a courtroom litigator was very obvious to me, someone who was also a lawyer for a time, in reading this book. It reads, at least for the first half or so (which focuses on the criminal justice system), very much like an opening statement. He makes a lot of bold claims, including the one that makes up the subtitle of this book: that the way people of color are treated in this country is akin to a genocide. He highlights many specific, flagrant examples of injustice to illustrate his points. When it gets into the back half, into the larger systemic factors like education, the school-to-prison pipeline, and environmental pollution in close proximity to communities of color, it becomes more research focused, still providing real-life examples but rooted in empirical data. For me, the back half was much more successful than the front. There’s no denying the power of the true, awful stories, particularly around police misconduct but also stand-your-ground laws, but a few dozen examples from a nation of many millions of people does not make the strongest logical argument. The assertion about genocide seems to be more rhetorical than earnest, and while he has a lot of serious information to share it doesn’t really fully support that claim so I was pleased that it didn’t form a more significant through-line. Despite the power of the moral clarity of his argument, the book isn’t quite as successful as it could be. He sometimes argues both sides of an issue like mandatory minimum sentences, decrying both overly broad judicial discretion as having allowed for conscious and unconscious biases to be weaponized against people of color but also that mandatory minimums make it too difficult for judges to consider the totality of circumstances. Those two options are either end of a continuum, but it seems he thinks both are too flawed for wide-scale implementation without much in the way of ideas about alternatives. He sometimes wants courts to be more small-c conservative on following precedent, but then sometimes wants them to engage in “bold” interpretations of statutory or constitutional language. Many of his broad-scale facets of racism, like lack of educational opportunity, are more directly connected to poverty than to race. Besides a handful of concrete suggestions in the epilogue of the book, it’s a bit unclear what solutions are really being advocated. I was expecting and hoping for something more akin to a legal brief, designed to appeal to my head, but what he clearly intended to write was much more a call to emotion and righteous anger. This would serve as an effective introduction to the major arguments around the way racism manifests for someone already inclined to be sympathetic but isn’t well-informed. It’s too much of a polemic for a fence-sitter and too basic for anyone who already has a fundamental grasp on the issues.
- A Pale View of Hills: Etsuko is an older Japanese woman living in England, being visited by her younger daughter, Niki, after her older daughter, Keiko, recently committed suicide. While Niki’s father was the British man Etsuko was married to in England, Keiko was a product of Etsuko’s previous life in Japan and had always struggled to adjust to her changed circumstances. Niki’s visit coincides with Etsuko’s remembrance of Sachiko, a woman she once knew when she lived in Nagasaki. Sachiko and her small daughter Mariko entered Etsuko’s life when the latter was pregnant, moving into a cottage close to the apartment building Etsuko resided in with her husband, Jiro. Like everyone else, including Etsuko, Sachiko’s existence was turned upside down by the war, her once-comfortable circumstances having changed drastically. She’s met an American serviceman, Frank, and is determined to get herself and her daughter overseas to new and better opportunities. Despite her stated concern for her child’s future, though, Sachiko is often almost frighteningly indifferent to her. Mariko is frequently left home alone despite being very young, and even when her mother is home, she disappears outside with little apparently concern from Sachiko. As the story of the women’s acquaintance progresses to its conclusion, though, inconsistencies start to arise that call into question Etsuko’s remembrances. Kazuo Ishiguro has come to be one of my very favorite authors, and this was his debut novel. The themes that have preoccupied him in much of his writing (at least the ones that I’ve read), like memory, loss, and the ways people avoid knowing the things that it would undermine their self-concept to understand, are very much present here. So too is a prose style characterized by elegance and restraint. It’s remarkably sophisticated for a debut, but coming from the perspective of having read his later work, it’s also obvious how much room he had to grow from here. He places an important plot/character development literally in the last ten pages of the book, not giving it the room to breathe and be as effective as it might have. There are questions left unanswered, some of which are fine to leave hanging, some of which feel like they could and should have been resolved. Ishiguro’s characters often feel at a remove, but especially so here. I found the way the book dealt with the war to be interesting, especially in light of where it takes place. There are glancing, oblique references to the tragedy that took place in Nagasaki itself, while the aftermath of the war is largely explored through the breakdown of previously-existing social structures, including Etsuko’s father-in-law’s reaction to an article criticizing the way he and other teachers instructed their students, as well as Sachiko’s displacement from her previous life and family. It’s overall a very solid book, made the more gratifying to read by knowing that the promise it hints at would in fact be realized. A must-read for Ishiguro heads, and worth your time for everyone else!
- The Chosen and the Beautiful: One book that comes up pretty much anytime there’s a discussion of the mythical Great American Novel (and, to be honest, what I would probably argue for if pressed) is The Great Gatsby. It’s 100 years old and still speaks to some of the most salient issues in American life, particularly those related to money. Nghi Vo’s retelling adds race and sexuality to the mix by taking side character Jordan Baker and making her a queer Vietnamese woman, adopted as a very small child into the upper-crust Louisville that includes a young Daisy. But that’s not the only element Vo changes around the narrative. She also incorporates magic into this world, making it a place where souls can literally be sold to the devil, demon liquors give strange power to their drinkers, and Jordan herself possesses the ability to cut paper into shapes which she can bring to life. In this version, Gatsby has bargained away his essence for the wealth and power to woo Daisy, but his love for her does not impede his exploration of life’s other pleasures, including an affair with Nick and a flirtation with Jordan, who are involved with each other as well. It makes for a love rhombus of a sort. The story, while including new material centered around Jordan and her experiences, proceeds down the path we’ve all come to know, leaving Jordan’s life forever changed. It’s a bold move to make your debut novel a retelling of one of America’s most consistently celebrated books, and Nghi Vo manages to in large part pull it off, at least for me. I suspect how much a reader likes this book will be directly related to their appreciation for Vo’s prose style, because it’s very distinctive and quite different than Fitzgerald’s original. It’s very vivid, lots of simile and metaphor, heavy on imagery. While I can appreciate elegant and delicate writing, at heart I have always enjoyed rhetorical flourish, so it worked well for me. Indeed, it’s the writing that elevated the book in my estimation, because I don’t think it was entirely successful on a plot level. While I loved the introduction of outright queerness into the narrative, along with the racial angles introduced in changing Jordan’s ethnicity, the new fantastical/magical realism elements felt like Vo was trying to do a bit too much. Jordan’s paper-cutting powers are underdeveloped, and the introduction of a Gatsby-employed troupe of Vietnamese magicians for his parties who share her skill raised questions that the narrative never even attempts to answer. As Jordan was taken from her home well before the age she would have been explicitly instructed in such a thing, are we meant to believe her talent is inborn and shared by all Vietnamese people? All Asians? Are manifestations of magic segregated by race? Vo doesn’t address these questions, or several others that popped into my head around demons and the selling of souls, which makes most of the magical elements of the story feel like vibe-y set dressing. The vibes are great, the atmosphere Vo creates is glamorously sordid, but I found myself wishing more than once that the magic had just been left out. I think the story is strong enough without it, though I will say that I thought a late-occurring plot revelation didn’t quite land. On the whole, though, it bites off a lot and did manage to chew most of it, mostly on the power of its prose. I had a good time reading it! I would recommend it, but it’s one of those where if you’re not bought into its style within 20 pages or so, it’s going to be a rough read.
In Life…
- More home repair: In the last six months, we’ve replaced our fridge, our HVAC system, and our sewer drain pipe. And this month we added our dishwasher to the list! Pretty sure the only appliance left from when we bought only five years ago is the oven, so fingers crossed it holds out for a bit longer because we’re kind of tapped out on things that aren’t working right.
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